David Erschler will be giving a talk entitled “Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork” at Hampshire College on Wednesday, November 18 at noon in Adele Simmons Hall. An abstract follows.
Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork
I will discuss the importance of doing theoretically-oriented linguistic field work and the urgency to perform such field work on modern spoken Yiddish (Hassidic Yiddish). I will illustrate this via a discussion of two phenomena from Yiddish syntax: the position of the finite verb (the so called "verb-second") and the structure of relative clauses in Yiddish.
